Archive for the 'market totalitarianism' Category
Monday, March 8th, 2010
“Consumer” Training
Big business marketing is inherently totalitarian. It can’t stop. It must commercialize and commodify everything. If it didn’t, the mega-rich investors who are the primary beneficiaries of corporate capitalism would stop getting richer than they already are. And that is intolerable to them. Completely off-the-table.
As I’ve been reporting here, one of the latest trends in this advancing piranha-munch on human culture is the corporate effort to get men to buy and use as many “beauty” commodities as women (whose training in corporate cosmetics began a century ago) do.
In the marketing press, they are increasingly explicit about this push, now that it’s gathering steam and seemingly bearing behavioral and financial fruit:
[I]t’s a long battle. Ed Shirley, vice chairman of beauty and grooming for P&G has been an advocate for men’s skin care since the late 1990s, when he could see how much more developed men’s skin care was outside the U.S. “North American guys are less involved [in skin care], but it’s up to us to help them.”
What they should be doing — in the long-term marketing scheme of things — is washing their faces and using moisturizer before bed. “We know that if you had a full regimen of morning and evening care, your shaving experience would be better,” Mr. Shirley said. “And we have that right to have that conversation with guys, because the shaving experience is the anchor grooming event.”
Not that Gillette is going to bring up that moisturizer-before-bed subject just yet. But it’s moving the discussion in that direction in part through the line of shave-preparation products coming to market in June with its Gillette Fusion ProGlide razor system, which includes a heating face scrub and moisturizing aftershave with sunscreen protection.
“We’re committed to winning with men,” said Mr. Shirley.
Procter & Gamble Co. recently has reorganized its beauty-marketing ranks largely to help capture the growing potential of the men’s market, and recently got San Antonio-based supermarket chain H-E-B to try a men’s personal care section. Unilever has made men the focus of its biggest 2010 launch for its biggest personal-care brand, Dove. Unilever sees a $700 million opportunity to grow the men’s personal-care market in categories where it competes — essentially personal wash, hair care and deodorants — a market currently measured by Nielsen at $2.1 billion that the marketer expects will hit $2.8 billion by 2012.
And, as always, as they manipulate gender and sexuality to rake in dollars, the marketers can’t dare do anything but remain loyal to the lowest common denominator, for fear of losing customers and sparking right-wing flak storms (the left being not only too fragmented to act, but generally confused and ultra-tame on the actual use of ideology in advertising). Hence, this:
It all hearkens to the heady days of 2002, when personal-care marketers of all sorts were fixated on men as their new frontier, even coining the concept of the “metrosexual” grooming and fashion-obsessed male. The enthusiasm faded into what seemed like vague disappointment, as brands such as L’Oreal, Nivea, Neutrogena and Gillette tried launching skin and in some cases hair-care lines for men that had trouble keeping their space on U.S. shelves.
It’s been at least six years since any marketer could be caught uttering the M word. Marketers who had heralded the arrival of the “metrosexual” last decade found the term tended to pigeonhole their products with a relatively narrow segment of upscale, fashion-conscious men. The reality is that the segment exists and has kept growing, but marketers seeking to sell such products as shampoo and bodywash to men are appealing to a much broader audience, too.
In other words, we all know that metro-sexual is halfway to homo-sexual, right? Mum’s the word, then!
And the overall impact on gender relations, despite the rank “femininity” of using lotion and, presumably, eventually, make-up products? Probably more male media tropism and sexism:
Boon for male-centric media
The male call by marketers has also been a boon for media that cater to the demographic, like ESPN. “It’s definitely a growth area for us,” said Ed Erhardt, president of ESPN and ABC Sports, which is positioned to reap much of the uptick in competitive spending.
Such are the corporate capitalists’ plans for the 21st century. Beautiful, indeed.
[Quotes from Advertising Age, March 8, 2010]
Sunday, March 7th, 2010
More News from the Supply-Side Bailout
They bail themselves out. Then they prepare to repeat what caused the need for a bailout in the first place. Of course. They are a late-imperial overclass that stopped listening to anything but their own cant 30+ years ago.
From the latest Business Week comes a report on how this is happening in the housing(-bubble) sector, in which the big players are now apparently buying up land thinking they’ll get back to 1995:
An additional boost came last year when Congress passed a law allowing companies to get refunds on past years’ tax payments by applying their recent losses to earnings dating back five years. Many sold land at big losses to boost their refunds. The result was a windfall of $2.3 billion for the builders as a group, including $800 million for No. 1 Pulte Homes.
The result of those balance-sheet heroics? Builders have more than $12 billion in cash they can use to replenish their land inventory. Pulte and D.R. Horton each had $1.9 billion in cash and near-term equivalents at the end of December, Toll Brothers had $1.6 billion at the end of January, Lennar had $1.3 billion, and KB Home had $1.2 billion at the end of November.
[These corporate builders'] interest in unfinished land usually comes later in the housing cycle, says Thomas E. Lucas, senior vice-president of operations for DMB in Scottsdale. “We didn’t think we’d sell raw land for three to four years,” Lucas says. That’s a striking vote of confidence considering the threats to housing from high unemployment, rising mortgage rates, and foreclosures.
Can you imagine non-capitalists ever being allowed to rewrite their income tax returns to minimize what they owe?
In any event, it’s clear that, in yet another economic sector, capital has been restored, but has no idea what to do with itself. So, despite their unwillingness or inability to lift a finger to help their own potential customers, they nonetheless presume something, somehow will return them to “normalcy.” Probably their own glorious entrepreneurial spirit, I suppose…
Thanks again, Obama, for all this “change.”
Friday, February 5th, 2010
Corporations in the Womb
In light of the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, I thought I’d share another reminder of the genesis of the modern conglomerate business corporation.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, when major investors in the United States found themselves in a confounding situation.
Friday, January 22nd, 2010
Empire of Boondoggles
In American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips reviewed the fact that all decrepit empires become increasingly sclerotic and psychotic in the last days of their hegemony.
Conservative true believers will scoff: the United States is sue generis, they say, a unique and chosen nation. What did or did not happen to Rome, imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Britain is irrelevant. The catch here, alas, is that these nations also thought they were unique and that God was on their side. The revelation that He was apparently not added a further debilitating note to the later stages of each national decline.
Dmitry Orlov adds to Phillips’ observations by pointing out that, in their senescence, failing empires, being ruled by narrow, long-pampered overclasses that have lost the interest and capacity for self-criticism and institutional innovation, always try to solve their problems by redoubling, rather than altering, established practices. High on their own fumes, late-imperial bigwigs try harder and harder to get different results from the same old practices. Nothing else is permitted serious consideration:
Economic collapse has a way of turning economic negatives into positives. It is not necessary for the United States to embrace the tenets of command economy and central planning to match the Soviet lackluster performance in this area. We have our own methods that are working almost as well. I call them “boondoggles.” They are solutions to problems that result in more severe problems than those they attempt to solve.
Just look around and you will see boondoggles sprouting up everywhere, in every field of endeavor: we have military boondoggles like Iraq, financial boondoggles like the doomed retirement system, medical boondoggles like private health insurance and legal boondoggles like the intellectual property system. At some point, creating another boondoggle becomes the preferred course of action: since the outcome can be predicted with complete accuracy, there is little risk.
So why not, as a matter of policy, only propose solutions that are guaranteed to simply create more problems, for which further solutions can then be proposed?
I would suggest that this is precisely the proper context in which to view yesterday’s multiply amazing Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Orwellianly-named front-group plaintiff in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
In the short run, the further heightening of the power of money in elections will probably matter very, very little. It’s not like there has been anybody other than money-grubbing corporate stooge-whores within a country mile of power in this society since the FDR epoch, if then.
But, in the long run, you have to wonder about the fate of a society facing so many immense negative consequences of market totalitarianism, which permits its ruling class to keep granting itself more and more privileges. As another blogger writes:
maybe i’m just in a leftist mood or something. but if money is speech according to the conservative court, then constitutional rights vary directly with income. now they do anyway, always one sort of argument for programs to redistribute wealth etc. but what i’m saying is that conservatives need to think about where explicitly endorsing this idea will take them. and then let’s add the premise that corporations are persons – a kind of legal commonplace, but fearsomely radical if the idea is that corporations possess inherent rights in the declaration-of-independence sense, and hence if the first amendment and others apply to them.
alright start off with the idea that i and goldman sachs both have free speech. now throw in the premise that this right varies with, ranges over, or actually is money. then my right is shockingly negligible and circumscribed. we might say that goldman sachs has ten million times as much right to free speech as i have, approximately. in part, i admit, this is simply a statement of antecedent fact rather than some sort of normative program. but these things cannot all be true at once: a corporation is a man. all men are created equal, that is, they have certain inalienable rights. money is speech.
i would like to do an excursus, for one thing on individualism and the relation of corporatism to communism, but instead i will say: the decision makes the most basic ideas on which the american republic is founded entirely incoherent. it makes the basic american political vision inyourface absurd. that, one would think, should have given the court some pause.
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
Rape in Context
From The Daily Howler:
Total spending on health care, per person, 2007:
United States: $7290
Switzerland: $4417
France: $3601
United Kingdom: $2992
Average of OECD developed nations: $2964
Italy: $2686
Japan: $2581
To anyone with an ounce of sense, it’s obvious what those data mean. A real progressive would scream and yell about those remarkable data. But in the career liberal world, all is silent. We’ve been silent for the past fifteen years—since the last time we failed.
(Note: Paul Krugman discussed similar data in a series of columns in 2006. Michael Moore discussed this situation in 2007, in Sicko. But go ahead: Name the liberal journal, or the career liberal journalist, who used the work of Krugman or Moore as a springboard to a long, shrill discussion. Which of our liberals did that?)
People are happy with their current insurance for a fairly obvious reason: They don’t know how badly they’re being looted! In part, they don’t know that basic fact because our career liberals simply won’t tell them. “We’re not Europe,” Serious People write. And that has largely been that.
Nuff said.
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
Ford Thumbs its Nose at Distracted Driving Facts
Do corporate capitalists really commit highly-researched mass murder in order to reap their profits? You bet your expendable “consumer” ass they do.
Today’s example: The Ford Motor Company’s promulgation of its “Sync” package of telecommunications interfaces in the dashes of new cars and trucks.
Among many other extremely dangerous things, the newest version of “Sync” is going to add hands-free text messaging to the increasingly distracted driving experience.
A long train of independent research has shown that the use of hands-free cellular telephones provides little or no safety benefit compared to hands-on use.
Given that text messages are inherently denser and not genuinely live and interactive, even when converted to audio, they almost certainly require quite a bit more attention than does a phone conversation. Hence, hands-free texting is virtually certain to contribute to thousands of additional automobile deaths every year.
Ford cares not:
“[Sync] is a reason now to buy a Ford,” Chief Executive Officer Alan Mulally said in an interview.
“Sync is easy to sell to a person under 35,” said John Wolkonowicz, an analyst at IHS Global Insight of Lexington, Massachusetts. “Sync is about entertainment and connectivity, which is very Gen Y.”
To the extent it bothers to explain its murder-for-money, Ford relies on the old tobacco corporation gambit: Fudge-talk about unreleased internal “studies”:
Ford, which has endorsed legislation to outlaw texting while driving, said its research indicates that hands-free communication doesn’t distract drivers.
“Most of the industry studies show that just driving and just talking is the same,” Kuzak said. “As long as the customer’s eyes are on the road, they are not compromised.”
And our public servants’ response to this blatant bullshit? Nothing, nada, nil.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood testified Oct. 29 that he found Ford’s Sync system distracting when he tested it on a Taurus sedan during a visit to Dearborn.
“As much as I liked driving the Taurus and as much as I liked the Sync system where you put your BlackBerry in and it syncs all your numbers, it’s a distraction,” LaHood told a House highways subcommittee at a hearing on distracted driving.
Despite this personal finding of the highest transportation official in the land, literally nothing is being done to block Sync and its counterpart plans at the other car corporations.
At the level of social criticism, this increasing encroachment of entertainment and marketing on the space of the car-driver is still more proof of the totalitarian nature of corporate capitalism. As somebody once noted:
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
Even when the invasions and expansions begin to threaten the future viability of the system’s own core commodity!
